Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

THREE. From Oppositionality to Integration

It’s five o’clock somewhere. alan jackson, in song by Jim “Moose” Brown and Don Rollins c h a p t e r t h r e e From Oppositionality to Integration dabbs, we recall, characterized southerners as at home in the world, which they think of as the South. It seems that southerners are now broadening their awareness of the world while retaining an identity with the region, and in so doing they are burying their sense of opposing the nation, especially the North. More frequent relations with the world away from home (which then becomes part of home by extension) create a notion in southerners of being world citizens, global human beings, in contrast to a regional and oppositional identity. Far away penetrates deep within. Such a shift entails change—economic and political, to be sure, but also cultural and psychological—a shift in southerners’ conceptual framework. Indeed, Dabbs’s world becomes a new world or at least a new worldview, necessitating a new sense of identity, of who I am or who we are. 47 48 Trends So pervasive and powerful is this shift of identity that we must approach an understanding of its potential in stages, by examining analogous experiences . We begin with the experience of losing one’s native identity by taking on a foreign identity, losing the self—culturally and perhaps psychologically—to become the other. Pat Noone, a British anthropologist , became Noone of the Ulu, a westerner who went native, marrying into and apparently becoming a member of the Ulu tribe of Borneo. Doing so, he disappeared from the Western world; he was never found by the brother who went to search for him. Most anthropologists do not give up their identities in order to “go native,” but they do attempt participant observation, which requires that they learn a society’s language and culture so as to participate in and learn about it. John Walker Lindh became a participant in the Taliban by taking part in training camps and schools. I once lived and worked for eight months in such camps and schools run by an Indonesian Muslim organization, Muhammadiya, but I remained an observer. I did not become a Muhammadiyan in the way Lindh allegedly became a member of the Taliban, though the experience deeply affected me nonetheless. A photograph shows me in their training camp, doing calisthenics with the Muhammadiyans—a white man a head taller than my companions—yet I don’t remember that I thought of myself as different at that time. During the weeks in the training camps I spoke only Indonesian, yet I don’t recall noticing that I was speaking any language at all. On one occasion I thought I might never go home; home seemed so far away. The far away (which had become close to home) did affect the deep within, though within limits. I never did convert to Islam or join Muhammadiya, though a standing joke was that I was “kenak da’wa”—hit by evangelizing—in the camp. Because I was living with the Muhammadiyans twenty-four hours a day but was neither a member nor a Muslim, they confronted my distinctiveness by occasionally expressing hope that I would convert, as an imam voiced in a prayer at a certain mosque. Later a headline in their magazine, Suara Muhammadiya, stated that I was about to do so. This sort of experience is standard in anthropological fieldwork; rare but telling is the conversion to the other, as in the case of Noone or Lindh. From Oppositionality to Integration 49 Better-known shifts in identity include milder cross-cultural exposures and identifications, from study abroad to tourism or merely by reading, looking at museum exhibits, and communicating electronically. Reactions to other cultures range from casual interest to some degree of culture shock but rarely, if ever, to conversion. Certainly all of these reactions entail shifts of identity, and more radical shifts can be traumatic. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often arises when soldiers move from combat to home or from home to a foreign place and then back to home. PTSD is caused not only by combat but also by dislocation into a foreign context. Likewise, dislocation can be stressful to immigrants, whether or not they experience violence, because they too change orientation and identity, often forever. Global Identity Global identity does not necessitate shifts of identity as particularized as that...